Zach Newbould was holding his breath, nose-to-nose with Nicole Scherzinger, hoping she couldn’t smell the chicken wings. During rehearsals for Netflix’s Building the Band, she had decided to demonstrate how he should hold an audience’s attention. Lunch had barely settled.
“She just comes walking towards me and literally pins her eyes to mine and pushes her nose against mine,” he tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ. “And I’m sitting there holding my breath because I don’t want to put it in her face. Then she did it about three more times.”
“To be fair, she wasn’t just walking at you,” Mason Watts interjects. “She was power walking.”
The footage never aired, much to Newbould’s relief and his bandmates’ disappointment. The lesson, however, survived.
“I’ve actually gotten comments saying that my eye contact can be too intense on stage sometimes,” he admits. “So maybe I got to dial it back.”
Together in Sydney for their one-off Oxford Art Factory show, Midnight Til Morning are good at this — supplying the detail that makes a bandmate’s story slightly worse. Australians Watts and Conor Smith and Americans Newbould and Shane Appell chose one another through the series’ blind audition process, entering as solo musicians and emerging as a four-piece. Viewers got the introductions, the first performances, the reveal. Becoming a band has taken considerably longer.
“I think we were yet to determine what we sounded like,” Watts says. “That show was a great introduction to each other, but we were singing covers on the show for starters, and obviously we’d only known each other for a couple of weeks throughout that show.”
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They’ve since toured internationally, released a string of singles and spent almost every day together. Their debut, “Bye”, was co-written with Benson Boone and Amy Allen. There have been enormous stages and fans crossing oceans to see them. Somewhere between all that, four individual lives have become difficult to separate. Watts estimates they’ve each been home for only about a month since filming finished. They’ve had plenty of time to get acquainted.
“We’ve had tough conversations and great conversations,” Watts says. “We’ve experienced life together. I think all of that just makes for hopefully a lot more depth in the music.”
That’s the promise behind “Anything”, a single Appell describes as a transition into what comes next. Watts hears a throwback to the 2010s in its production. Smith hears a band catching up with itself.
“I think these previous singles that we did, we recorded them almost two years ago in a time when we’d just come off the show,” he says. “I think in the past four months, we’ve recorded new music that I think resonates with us so much more, and I think it’s going to resonate with our fans.”
He’s careful not to dismiss what came before. They were finding their sound then; now they know one another well enough to recognise something more distinctly theirs.
“This new project we’re doing is something that we think is very Midnight Til Morning,” he says. “And I think it’s a lot more mature as well.”
Their first decisions about each other were surprisingly practical. Smith jokes that Watts’ Australian accent sealed the deal, but says their booth conversations went beyond how well someone could sing. They talked about hobbies and being outdoors. They wanted to know whether they could live with these people.
“If we’re going to be in a band for the next six, 10 years, you want to be able to actually like each other,” he says. “Obviously, sounding good is important, but getting along is even more important.”
Watts felt he was meeting people who were already friends. Newbould was pleasantly surprised by the visual outcome: “I saw three handsome guys walk out and I’m like, ‘All right, this will work.’”
Friendship has since required a few adjustments to the solo-artist mindset. Appell’s explanation moves seamlessly from artistic sacrifice to household chores.
“In the past where it was your own kind of song, you could do whatever you want,” he says. “You got to share everything, share food, share things in the house, you know what I mean? Share roles, cleaning up.”
Watts supplies reminders about the kitchen. Appell pushes the content side. Smith credits Watts’ industry relationships with helping secure their team, although his assessment comes with a qualification: “Mason is a lot more mature than us in the music industry, maybe not in the personal industry.”
“The rest of us, we haven’t done anything at all,” he adds.
In the studio, sharing can mean accepting that someone else’s voice serves the song better. They’ll each sing a part, listen and vote.
“We’ll just be honest with each other,” Newbould says. “We all sound good in our own individual parts, but sometimes there’s a certain note that just sounds a little bit better in that specific part, and then we choose that.”
Asked about disagreements, Appell initially claims they “duke it out”, before abandoning the joke. If someone feels strongly, they tend to give that opinion room.
“At the end of the day, we all just want the best for the music and for each other,” Watts says. “We’re pretty good at knowing where people are at. And like Shane said, if someone really feels a certain way, they probably feel that way for a reason.”
Knowing where someone is at also helps in airports. Appell describes the disorganisation that comes with his ADHD. “I’m losing passports, I’m losing everything,” he says. Newbould jokes that he walks five feet behind him to help. Watts accepts responsibility for late lobby appearances. Apparently, the man reminding everyone to clean the kitchen can still be five minutes behind schedule.
Distinguishing a work issue from someone’s off day is harder. “I don’t think you can,” Watts says. “I think it all melts into one thing. There is no separation between work and personal between the four of us anyway.”
Sydney has become a shared base, with recording sessions and friendships giving the Americans a second home here, too. Appell has already tried a ginger beer shoey and wants to make it a tradition. The Oxford Art Factory date was a chance to test their new show before Europe and look after the fans in a city they keep returning to.
A smaller room also gives them something a festival can’t: faces they can read. Smith likes seeing reactions and signs, hearing familiar voices sing back. At Hyde Park in London and Summer Sonic in Japan, he says, most of the audience didn’t know them. There was more pressure to be perfect.
“The smaller venues, you can see everyone a lot more clearly and you can see their reactions,” Smith says. “I think we kind of feed off that if we see someone having fun and we can read signs as well when we do a smaller venue.”
At their own shows, imperfection can become part of the relationship. Newbould once began “Heart on Fire” on guitar, then forgot to sing the first verse.
“They all stared at me and we just had a laugh,” he says. “I just told our crew to just play back the song and I was like, ‘Let’s just start this over.’”
For Appell, the bigger challenge can be registering a performance before it’s gone. A set that feels long in rehearsal vanishes once the adrenaline arrives. It brings them back to advice Liam Payne gave during the series’ final episodes: pause and notice what’s happening.
“It’s a very unique life to live and a very privileged one, and not a lot of people get to experience the things that we’re very fortunate to,” Watts says. “He just said, ‘Make sure that you take a second for yourself and really enjoy these things because they’ll come and go very quickly.’”
Smith is still adjusting to spending months preparing for something that ends in 40 minutes. The silence afterwards can be harder to understand.
“We spoke about it today, actually,” he says. “It’s definitely a weird feeling of being on top of the world for seven months on tour and then coming home and you’re like, ‘Wow, what is my purpose here?’”
They’ve all been homesick. Newbould says touring was difficult for everyone before they became more settled in having their “little family on the road”. “We’ve had our moments for sure. Honestly, we’ve all gotten a lot better at it though,” he says. “We have our little family on the road, and we just go with it at this point. I feel like we’re all pretty content.”\
That feeling of finding your people has begun to extend beyond the four of them.
Their fans voted to call themselves Midnighters. Smith still finds the overnight camping and international travel surreal, but what matters most is what people find when they arrive.
“People making friends and they’re finding comfort in our music and our band,” he says. “I think that’s the most surreal thing, is seeing so much love and passion in our fan community.”
The debut album is planned for next year. They’re still adding songs; Watts says they’ll keep writing until someone tells them to stop. Another Australian tour receives a teasing “possibly”. Appell wants bigger crowds and more people to hear the work. Smith wants the thing that has grown around it to hold.
“The community that we’ve built is so strong and they all love each other,” he says. “That’s one thing we always want to push towards, is a healthy and safe and comforting fandom, which I think we have, which we’re stoked about.”
